Lecture 1: What is Resilience?

(Video #3)
SPEAKER Clay Cook:
We're going to now jump into defining resilience. We learned a little bit about stress-particularly, how chronic stress can impact our minds, body, and behavior. And that provides a
context in which we need to pursue becoming resilient. Because it's in the face of stress that we
have to demonstrate resilience, because if we don't, we can actually development, mental health
problems. And it can impact our overall well being and the quality of life we have.
So when was resilience first really studied? It was first studied in kids who were being reared in
the most difficult and troublesome conditions, kids who basically didn't have parents, they lived
in intense poverty, and we studied a sub-population of kids who lived under those conditions and
were achieving normal development and being successful despite having the cards stacked up
against them. So resilience was really originally conceptualized as these individuals who grow
up in extreme adversity, yet are still doing well in life. Basically, the odds said they shouldn't do
well in life, but they were.
And so originally research was devoted on studying young children who are able to become
successful adults. Yet they faced a variety of what we call risk factors-- things that would
indicate that they shouldn't do too well throughout their development. We now know that
everybody experiences adversity. It's relative, the amount of adversity, but we all have things
that could potentially impact our well being, and that are perceived as stressors, and could cause
wear and tear on our minds, body, and behavior.
Now, resilience is more of a universally-applied term. And there's really two elements to it that
are consistent with that two dimension, or two continuum model of mental health that we've
discussed. The first is what we call surviving. And to survive, that's about developing the
capacity, ability, skill set, routines, whatever you want to say in order to bounce back from
adversity. So if you have a loved one die, do you have the skills to actually bounce back from
what is a stressful situation? If you're going through an economically hard time yourself or your
family, do you have the ability to cope and manage that situation? Can you survive that moment
and come out the other side better? So there's the survival dimension. So we say really it's the
ability to manage life stressors and continue to pursue and do well in the face of adversity.

Lecture 1: What is Resilience? (Video #3)

The other element to resilience is what we call the thrive element. And thrive means doing what
matters most-- enhancing, optimizing your well being. Basically, you don't have to be under
stress or confronted with any major challenger or stressor in order to enhance and optimize your
well being. So are you engaging in intentional practices, routines, and habits that optimize how
well you feel, you spend more time in a happy state, you are getting the most out of life. And
ultimately, when you reflect on your life, you view it as something that's highly satisfying,
fulfilling, and meaningful.
So throughout this course, we're going to be talking about resilience as having these two heads to
it, both being survive and thrive. So resilience is ultimately your ability to survive and thrive in
life. Ann Masten from the University of Minnesota is probably the foremost expert in the
concept of resilience. And she has now defined resilience as ordinary magic. And what she
means by this is you don't have to be born with resilience. It's not something that you either have
this genetic endowment that affords you the ability to be resilient. And if you're not born with it,
well, you're screwed. Well, that it doesn't fit with modern day research. It also isn't necessarily
luck. So it's not something that's just random, serendipitous occurrence in someone's life. And
so this notion of ordinary magic just means resilience can be cultivated. Resilience can be
acquired. And it comes through having the awareness, engaging in intentional practices, being
open to learning, applying, and integrating particular lifestyle choices, habits, and routines into
one's life. So it's a matter of what we do and we seek to acquire that defines whether we can
become resilient or not, and it's not a matter of being born with it or simply being lucky in life.
Like any good cooking recipe, resilience is a combination of ingredients. So imagine for a
second something that you cook really well. There are certain ingredients that have to go into
that recipe in order for you to get that end product, which is a really delicious meal. Resilience is
the same way. Research has been able to uncover specific ingredients that if people intentionally
incorporate, or integrate, into their life, it produces the end result, which is the ability to survive
and thrive in life.
We will discuss a range of things that you can do in your life to become resilient, including
mindfulness-based practices, values clarification and commitment-- which seems a bit confusing
and ambiguous now, but it will make sense later on when we dive into that resiliency practice
area. We'll talk about how to purposefully cultivate positive emotions. Negative emotions get

Lecture 1: What is Resilience? (Video #3)

most of the air play or attention. But positive emotions actually lead to a lot of resilient benefits
and increase our well being. So we'll talk about what you can do specifically to cultivate positive
emotions to feel better. We'll also go on a different side of the emotional coin and we'll talk
about negative emotions-- not negative emotions being bad, but when they become too intense,
how we can do things that are highly regrettable, and our self-defeating when we're under the
influence of negative emotions.
We'll also dive into the idea of connecting with others in very meaningful ways, either through
mentorships, seeking social support, as well a selecting really good role models. These are other
elements to becoming a resilient person. We'll talk about TLCs. This is Therapeutic Lifestyle
Choices-- specific, healthy, lifestyle choices that are cheap and readily available, yet produce
huge benefits in terms of physical, emotional, and psychological well being.
And we'll end this with developing a roadmap for our future. And this roadmap will lay out a
plan for how we intend to integrate resilience ingredients into our lives tomorrow, a week from
now, a month from now, a year from now, and hopefully decades from now, so you can continue
to strive to become resilient and be able to survive in the face of risk factors and adversity, and
thrive to optimize our well being.
So far we've discussed two really important concepts, and that is stress and resilience. Within
each one of these, we discussed critical elements of understanding that will lay the foundation for
the rest of the lessons in this course. So I want to make sure that you're walking away after
having covered these two concepts with the essential take-home messages. So the first thing I
want you to walk away with is that stress-- and to recognize that stress is unavoidable in life, and
that not all stress is bad. Remember the Yerkes-Dotson curve. Moderate but manageable levels
of stress are actually good for our performance. It's really when stress becomes too intense that it
can produce a wear and tear on our body. The second point is that chronic stress is very toxic to
our bodies, our minds, and our behavior. It can produce significant health problems, in terms of
cardiovascular health problems and the development of illnesses such as diabetes. It can impact
our minds, and the ability to think clearly, problem solve situations, be optimistic in the face of
adversity. And last, it impacts our behaviors. We do things that we later regret. We act
aggressively towards someone else. We avoid things we shouldn't. We withdraw from situations

Lecture 1: What is Resilience? (Video #3)

because we no longer see the importance of them. And ultimately, we can engage in things like
substance abuse, as well as other maladaptive ways to cope with life stressors.
Another take home point is that stress impacts our mental health fundamentally, but that our
mental health-- the modern conceptualization of mental health-- is that it falls on two dimensions
or continua. The first is what we call the stress continuum. And we have to do things to actively
manage to minimize that. The other part of our mental health is our well being continuum. So
we have to purposely and intentionally do things that optimize our well being and quality of life
and satisfaction. So when we think about resilience we also think about stress, and overall, our
mental health.
Then we touched on resilience as being ordinary magic. Resilience, remember, is defined by the
ability to survive in the face of adversity an thrive in order to optimize our well being and our
performance. But it's ordinary magic in the sense that we can learn it. We can acquire it. It
comes through purposeful activities and the integration of specific skills, habits, and routines into
our life. And we've discussed that there are certain ingredients, like a good cooking recipe, that
we can combine in order to become resilient. And that's what we're going to spin moving
forward is, what are these ingredients that go into the resilient recipe?